Samsung has announced its battery findings and findings of fault in the Note 7 fiasco. There was nothing wrong with the smartphone itself, but its batteries suffered from two separate, unrelated problems.

Lithium-ion is still the king, and it will probably stay that way for a long time. It’s not a question of initial research, but on following up and funding the hard work of taking projects from the lab to the mass market.

Sony is planning to commercialize lithium-sulfur batteries by 2020, and promising increases of up to 40% over conventional lithium-ion architectures. The devil is in the details, but a battery with 40% more specific energy at the same weight and cost as lithium-ion would enable EVs at lower price points.